[pardner]

There ought to be a "emergency shutoff" threshold, period. And there's just no customer-centric excuse for not implementing it after these many years.

Here's how to implement it:

"Amazon, what do you do today if my credit card fails and all the retries fail?"

Do THAT if billing hits <my emergency off switch threshold>.

Will it disrupt the heck out of all my AWS services? Of course. That's the point, if something went so seriously wrong that my billing hits an absurd level that will put me out of business, I'd rather have downtime.

[m0dest]

At one point, I owed a balance of $0.57 to AWS and started to get warning emails about my account being suspended. Just out of morbid curiosity, I waited to see what would happen.

2.5 years later, after dozens of automated mails, they finally suspended it.

[lupire]

The challenge is that there is a lag between consuming the resource and counting the price.

[pardner]

Seems like yet more "let perfect be the enemy of the good" thinking.

If you want a cut-me-off set to $X, and some lag might allow charges to reach X+Y before the cutoff took effect, which is the customer-centric answer:

a) don't offer ANY cap, simply let the customer's out of control charges just keep racking up to catastrophic levels that put them out of business?

b) cut it off as soon as you DO detect it exceeded their cut-me-off threshold even if by that point it has reached X+Y?